I think we've already gone beyond the whole "market forces be damned" thing when the government altered the pricing in accordance to the carbon trading industry, rstuart.

And I'm against the ETS for the simple reason that it just makes life harder and more expensive.

Funny you should mention western suburbs and roads, because an ETS scheme is like installing tollbooths and closing lanes on roads to supposedly and theoretically FORCE motorists to use public transport- without actually bothering to provide many decent transport systems.

In other words, I don't like government merely slugging us with an adverse condition just to hopefully bully us into taking the expense to change to some ideology.

And as our current alternatives are close to non-existant, I'm convinced that 'changing our ways' isn't the point.

Within recent days I have seen a televised report of the profitability of the various Sydney metropolitan tollways, most if not all of which I understand to be public-private partnerships. The results, if correctly reported, seemed, from a commercial point of view, to be very encouraging.

My question is, if the level of investment required for transport infrastructure is able to be made, and the return is what it is, why is public (taxpayer) investment in such not equally able to be made, with the expectation of comparable returns in due course flowing into the public treasury?

Another question I have is as to why, given that the grid infrastructure is largely already in place, similar public investment in low-emissions power generation capacity would not be equally viable for the grid-connected Australian public as the PPP toll roads appear to have been for the private consortia that have received these profit opportunities at the hands of, for example, the NSW government, over recent years?

rstuart,

Would I be correct in thinking the following quote, from the comments thread to the article to which you provided a link, explains why LFTRs do not already cover the planet?

"The current energy companies also have hundreds of
billions invested in the way everything is currently done.
New technology means changing the infrastructure
and there is little incentive for that. Especially if
changing the infrastructure means changing the pricing models.

Heck, it would be possible to make neighborhood-sized
thorium plants and both limit the big companies and
increase competition.

So, we have the government against the idea, the embedded
oligopoly against the idea, the radical environmentalists
against the idea, and most of the energy companies against
the idea. Since this is also a complex subject that uses
the “nuclear” word, it would be easy to drum up fear,
uncertainty, and doubt in the general populace.

This is an example of a great idea that is most likely doomed."

All the foregoing discussion, of course, resting upon the premise that coal-fired electricity generation constitutes an ongoing and unacceptable environmental threat.

Forrest Gump: "Would I be correct in thinking the following quote ... explains why LFTRs do not already cover the planet?"

No, or at least not in the sense I meant it. It explains why there have been no new nuclear reactors in Australia and the US for decades. But new plants are being built apace in other parts of the world, and none of the planned new plants are LFTR. That quote does not explain why. You would expect them to be, given Alex's writeup.

I thought the quotes I listed in http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9857#159029 did explain why.

Forrest Gump: "Within recent days I have seen a televised report of the profitability of the various Sydney metropolitan tollways ... from a commercial point of view, to be very encouraging."

It is easy for a government to get "very encouraging" commercial returns for any endeavour they take on. They can easily (and sometimes do) make large profits on water, sewage, waste collection, electricity and a whole host of other essential services they have a monopoly on. And as King Hazza pointed out, the toll operators have had road shutdowns, guarantees of no competing new toll roads and what not written into there contracts. King Hazza is right. That sucks. You could use the same tricks to ensure a train service is profitable.

Forrest Gump: "expectation of comparable returns in due course flowing into the public treasury?"

What? That is absurd. The public treasury is _expected_ to make a loss. If they made a profit, they would not need to tax us. There are two ways we run these things. We can pay a private company to do it, or we can pay the government. We are far better off with a private company doing it if there is strong competitive market. But if the market tends toward a natural monopoly, having a monopolist running the show is far worse than putting elected officials we can hold to account in charge. Worse in the sense that we would be ripped off big time.

King Hazza: "I think we've already gone beyond the whole "market forces be damned" thing when the government altered the pricing in accordance to the carbon trading industry, rstuart."

That's rubbish. The government creates permits to emit and gives/sells them off, giving the receipts back to the users - you and I. The "concessions" you talk about is the government handing out too many permits to the emitters, ie creating more permits than are needed. Yes, this is a political bribe to get the legislation through. Yes, it renders the entire bloody scheme next to useless in the initial stages. But it costs no one anything, and as time moves on number of permits available reduces over the years until the targets are hit.

King Hazza: "And I'm against the ETS for the simple reason that it just makes life harder and more expensive."

For Pete's sake, every solution to AGW is going to make life harder and more expensive. The most efficient way to generate electricity now is using coal. If we invest billions in changing that the price of electricity is going to go up.

The ETS versus say Abbott's direct intervention is an argument about the most efficient to make the change happen. With the ETS, we take money from the emitters and give it to the consumers. It is supposed to be a zero sum game, but obviously it tilts the playing field towards cleaner electricity. In Abbott's scheme the government pays farmers to plough carbon into fields, plant trees, pays for research into carbon sequestration and so on.

The thing that gets me about this is where does Abbott get the money to do all this? Us, King. Via taxes. So here we have Rudd proposing no new taxes or spending government money, and Abbott proposing to tax us to pay for the change. Yet Abbott characterises the ETS as a big fat tax. It is the best example of Orwellian "new speak" I have seen in a while.

Gump and Stuart- interesting points:

But I'm not convinced the ETS is being paid back into the public- or otherwise the government would have subsidized it directly. As it is for us, our last yearly electricity bill came back telling us we used substantially less electricity than last year (that's just how we behave in my household)- but our bill is now much higher anyway (prompting our ongoing research into getting some PV panels (temporarily postponed for a while due to other priorities though- but having said that the expensive options have still been calculated cheaper than a mere couple years of relying on the grid).

But I doubt many other Australians will make the change as the alternatives aren't much cheaper at the moment, nor will they likely lower their usage (as I imagine most households use exactly the amount of power they'd feel they needed).
And the kicker is even if they were energy efficient- they'd still get slugged for what little they did use.

And as there aren't many suggestions in the government for alternate energy proposals (as you said, including the absence of Nuclear), or an APEC-esque summit to hook Australia up to some overseas green-energy generator or vehicle manufacturers, or even to subsidize, or help advertise or promote alternate energy products (except insulation- to their credit), there isn't going to be much of a public conversion to what little (and not quite cheap) options currently available.

And from the long crooked history of both the Labor and Liberal Party when it came to introducing new tax or compulsory service payment policies, I'm not convinced that either would actually want the consumers to change practices but simply give in and pay the extra, nor do I think they intend to either directly reimburse homeowners, put the extra taxes to direct public benefit or anything other than keep it or use it to prop up a superficial budget surplus next election (an old Liberal tactic).

Kind of like the GST introduced to replace the other taxes- except those taxes still remained anyway.

King Hazza: "our electricity bill ... is now much higher"

I don't know where you are, but in an Brisbane and yes it is the same here. I think is it the same everywhere. I don't know for sure what is driving it. I should take the time to find out what it is as it has been going up faster than inflation for a few years now. I confess to being a cynical bastard, and thinking when Beattie unregulated electricity prices while saying they should drop, my guess was he in fact he thought they would rise, and rise quickly and he didn't want his government to cop the blame.

OK, found this:

http://www.aer.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/732175

It appears the major costs are for capital works. Sigh. Yes, that would be it. Population growth strikes again.

This makes for interesting reading:

http://electricityweekqld.wordpress.com/

Apparently electricity retailers live in a world where they can be paying $30/MWh in one hour, then $3000/MWh the next. It must make life interesting for those doing the buying.

Finally Hazza, a word of advice on PV. Here in Queensland they will pay you $0.40/KWh for up to 30KW. If you can find a spot with enough land and have a sophisticated set-up, you can get about a 25% return on capital at that rate. Sounds brilliant. Only problem is, if you don't generate enough to cover your consumption, you are effectively paid the normal retail rate of $0.17/KWh, which is a loss. So to be worth it you have to go big. Very big.